One of the mothers was quoted as saying of her daughter, ‘I brought her all this way to die.’ Irony had kept this woman company until the end. Or had the words been placed in her mouth by a newsman with an ear for a good line? Can one believe anything one reads in a newspaper?

The young gunman, it emerged, was the son of a soldier who had been on active service with the United States Army. Some reports said the father had served in Vietnam, others denied this. Some said he had died in a psychiatric hospital. Some said he had been honourably discharged ‘on mental grounds’. The killer son had been a fan of Libya and the PLO, said one paper. He was a copycat cretin, said another.

Since the war ended, 60,000 veterans have committed suicide, more than the number killed in combat, one of the stories claimed. ‘From generation unto generation,’ suggested another. We survive the ordeals of bunker and jungle and bombardment and Diarrhoea-Aid of the East to run amok amidst the fair fields of the West.

It makes one think. And Liz thought.

She came, at the end of the week, to the conclusion that she was making no progress with Stephen’s dossier. She did not know enough about Indo-China to tackle it. (Somebody told her that the very phrase, ‘Indo-China’, was no longer acceptable. She was so ignorant that she could not see the objections.)

Maybe there was some message in there for her, but she began to doubt it. Perhaps it had arrived at her address by accident? She needed help.

She thought of ringing Alix again, or their old friend Esther Breuer, or her ex-husband Charles, or her ex-husband Edgar Lintot, or her new half-sister Marcia Campbell. Any of them would lend an ear and some understanding. Then she thought of her stepsons Alan and Aaron, and her daughter Sally. They too would listen with sympathy. (Stepson Jonathan and daughter Stella had defected: she rarely dared to ring either of them now.) Or perhaps she should ring Charles’s friend Melvyn Stacey, who worked for the International Red Cross and knew about the Thai-Kampuchean border? She thought of ringing the Vietnamese Embassy, or Oxfam, or war correspondent Hugo Mainwaring, or Peter Bloch at the embassy in Bangkok. She even thought of ringing Stephen’s brothers, but had no idea where to find them. He had been a private man, a disconnected man. After a while, she settled on Aaron, as she wanted to speak to him anyway about tickets for his new play. He was out. Success had purchased him an answering machine, and she heard his voice informing her that Aaron Headleand was unavailable. Slightly offended, she rang off, swallowed her pride, and did what she knew she should have done earlier: she rang Hattie Osborne.